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my experience is that there are no guidelines. if you are absolutely meticulous, as i was, you will find that the variation is enormous. within any given country, the rules may be fairly uniform, but when you branch out or learn traditional (or, vice versa, simplified) characters, you'll have to 'un learn' stuff. and to top it all off, when you learn grass script or even kaiti callligraphy, you'll have to change the order. so don't think about guidelines. forget about them. there are many inconsistencies i could point out, if i had the desire.
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magnetarDec 25 '11 at 18:03

If you mean there are no reliable rules, @magnetar, then I agree. However, guidelines are not as strict as rules. If you don't really care about the "correct" stroke order, but you just want to avoid obvious errors, then there are some helpful guidelines. See my answer below for more details.
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Don Kirkby♦Dec 26 '11 at 6:50

In my experience, you don't need to panic about the details of each character, and there is sometimes disagreement about the "correct" order. If you learn the general guidelines, you won't usually make embarrassing mistakes. If you do want to see the details of a specific character, there are lots of on-line resources. Here are the two I most often use:

MDBG.net - Type the pinyin and press enter, then click on the character you want. Finally, hover over the >> arrow and click on the brush to see a stroke order animation.

zhongwen.com - Use the search page to find the character you want, then scroll to the bottom and click on the "Animated" link to see a different stroke order animation.

They're much easier for me to use than an animation, because they are static images. I can scan back and forth with my eye, instead of waiting for the animation to cycle through. I used them as the inspiration for my Mnemosyne flash card files. Mine aren't quite as pretty, because they are automatically generated, but they have the added feature of a grid to guide your stroke placement.

I just discovered the Stroke Fanning reference. It's very compact (500 characters on a two-page PDF), but I still find the Wikimedia Commons format much more intuitive to read.